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Is Celebrity Gossip Harmless?

In 2020, the Instagram account "deuxmoi" lit up the internet celebrity gossip machine.  Run by someone who chooses to remain anonymous, it seemed harmless enough.  Its "Sunday comings and goings", which has become its most popular feature, seems harmless enough.

A great way to get ideas for the hot new places to eat, drink, and dance.  And who doesn't love to see trendy fashion?  

So you might stumble across deuxmoi, and enjoy looking at the pictures, or discovering that cool restaurant you hadn't heard about yet.  Especially if you live in either New York or California, these places are accessible to you.  Nothing wrong with getting some ideas for Saturday night.

It was when deuxmoi announced their new podcast with "enty" that alarm set in for me. 

I knew that name.  They are the writer, possibly owner of CDAN, and I knew they had gone Qanon years ago.  Here's a great article explaining that.

For years before Qanon, CDAN was obviously writing with a right-wing agenda, constantly bashing what are perceived to be "left wing" celebrities.  And often in a pretty insidious way; tying them to child sex abuse. 

Cdan went off the rails many years ago and long before Q, so they were well-positioned to become a Qanon hangout when Trump took office and half the country lost their fucking minds. 

And now, a trendy new Instagram account, which skews to a younger demographic, is exposing their followers to Qanon.  Period.  That's what deuxmoi is doing. 

Harmless?

Since I follow politics, I knew about CDAN, so I was immediately turned off what I thought was my harmless clicking through Instagram, reading about Bar Pitti in Soho, a restaurant I frequent, and getting fashion ideas.  

But it also made me rethink celebrity gossip all together and ask myself if it was ever harmless.

Celebitchy can seem like a harmless gossip site.  It bills itself as a feminist gossip site where "escapism can be smart".  And, the writers are definitely liberals and wrote a lot of good stuff during the Trump years.

You'd have to go back to early Jolie/Pitt/Aniston stuff to first unearth the crazy.  That's when some of Kaiser's most unhinged, and seriously sexist pieces were written.  During the Trump years, Kaiser dropped her deranged obsession with Aniston.

Then came Meghan Markle.

Now, most of the site is Royal news, and anything about Kate is not only unhinged, but it attracts some of the most misogynistic commentary since Aniston.

Their conspiracy theories over which outfit Kate wore, and why it's an insult to Meghan, is almost Qanon-level itself.  The site and even its commentators skew feminist, but all that goes to the wayside when they get a good hard-on for a particular women.  Then, they never heard of sexism.  

Absolutely fucking batshit, and it's destroyed the site.  It's now a site for people gripped by obsessions with Meghan Markle and Kate Windsor.  This site happens to be what I guess you would call "pro-Meghan" but no doubt many other sites exist that are the opposite and steeped in anti-Markle misogynoir.  The Daily Mail comes to mind.

Is celebrity gossip always misogynistic?  I'd say it often is.

You come for the clothes, but if you stay you become steeped in twisted misogynistic theories about why Jennifer Aniston is an ugly, whiny loser, and why Kate is a severely mentally ill layabout whose husband can't stand the sight of her.

But one story in particular always stayed with me, and it appeared as a cyber-infamous blind item on Lainey Gossip.

Lainey went all woke in 2020.  To be clear, I don't use the term woke as a pejorative, ever.  It's Lainey I'm mocking, because Lainey went IMO, faux-woke after being called out for her past.  

 

 

Amazing, isn't it?  Can you even imagine fixing your fingers to type that phrase?? That shit was considered just the thing on most of the celebrity blogs for about a twenty year time period,  2000 through 2020.  Once called out post- metoo and during the time of Black Lives Matter, Lainey decided she had went through an awakening, and now all of her older posts come with a disclaimer that they were written in her pre-woke days.

But she made a lot of bank on those posts.  She made a career on them.  And she had been criticized for her racism and misogyny many times.  She ignored it until she no longer could.  Because the times, they are achanging. 

What was one of her biggest successes?  The filth that she wrote in a now notorious "blind item:"

"It was mystifying several years ago why she was hyped the way she was hyped. Just another starlet with no real significant starring vehicles somehow ending up with a prestigious magazine cover proclaiming her as the next It. Well It never happened. And after all this time and a string of failures, she’s been trying to change the course. So she’s gone back to the major player who tried to make it happen for her the first time. There was an arrangement back then – her sexual services for his professional services – and apparently the same arrangement was resurrected recently in the hopes that she’ll finally confirm a juicy role to kickstart a stagnant career.

Never mind that he’s married. His wife benefits handsomely from his generosity and while he may not fulfill her with fidelity, he certainly makes up for it through client exchange. Probably better that way. And given what he looks like, it totally makes sense. But he is a legend in the business both for his accomplishments and for the way he leads these ladies to their accomplishments, counting a couple of award winners and a few box office heavyweights on his resumé…which is why he quickly tired of our poor girl and discarded her.

But not before drying her out. One day late summer, they were joined in a hotel suite by a third gentleman (identity insignificant), both of them enjoying her as she allowed herself to be taken, and, um, decorated appropriately, all for a reward at the end of the session – the privilege of simply looking at a script, no promise, no confirmation…just an advance read. And a suggestion to show up at a premiere for a few introductions. She is so desperate, it’s been so meagre, she submitted to the humiliation although gamely seems to have enjoyed it. An actor after all, obviously able to shut out her husband and child waiting for her back at home.

And then he just cut it off. Told her he could no longer help her. That her body in his bed was no longer required. Which of course only added to her degradation. She tried and tried to offer up more, willing to engage in further depravity, but was only met with rejection. Because he’s moved on. He’s hunting his next target. A young, nubile, blonde babe with a large profile and a perky rack who so far has been able to resist his advances but is trying to graduate from supporting roles in film, as the fact that she’s a headliner on the small screen has not helped with the quality of scripts she’s being offered, or with many of her auditions so far. She’s currently waiting on a big break and he’s trying to make sure it doesn’t happen, so that in her disappointment, she’ll come running to him, ready to wheel and deal."

Unfortunately, this filth, which for all we know was fed to her directly by Harvey Weinstein, was taken as truth and "everyone knew" it was about Gretchen Moll. My theory is that Gretchen turned Weinstein down and this planted, and wholly invented blind-item was from him. 

Gretchen wrote about it, eventually, here.  

So, how much harm did this "harmless gossip" cost Ms. Moll?  This rumor burned through Hollywood, it didn't stay on the internet.  It ruined someone.  It ruined a woman.

And Lainey has never been called to account for this.

Every time you click on her site, this is what you are rewarding. 

Now, back to deuxmoi.  The anonymous person behind that account, constantly posts that the emails and DM's she receives are unconfirmable and from mostly anonymous people.  So other than Sunday sightings which are sent in by her followers, mostly with pictures, and are celebrities they spotted while out and about over the weekend, what on earth are you reading?

Nothing but other people's fantasies for the  most part.  But what about when someone wants to put the hit on, maybe a colleague?  Or some random has become obsessed with a celebrity and hates his girlfriend because he should be dating her?

Maybe not so harmless.

And now, she's teamed up with a site that is, outright, a Qanon hangout.

How many younger people who never would have heard of CDAN, but love following the hot new kid on the gossip circuit, will be exposed to crazy deranged Qanon?  They already got the Wellness Moms through Facebook, now this. 

I'll be honest with you, if I want to see what the new fashion trends are, I can go to the Bloomingdales site, click "women" and then "new arrivals".  And I already knew about, and have been to, Bar Pitti, and The Crow's Nest.  I am a New Yorker and I don't need some anonymous internet punk to tell me anything about what's what in The Empire State.

After really thinking about what I'm contributing to, I clicked unfollow on deuxmoi.  I never read CDAN in the first place, and I stopped looking at Celebitchy a long time ago.

The only gossip I want to read is about the GOP eating itself.  This article here, for me, is gossip gold! 

Just something to think about in this cesspool we call the internet. 

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